@souvlaki @androcat I recently saw someone get dog-piled for saying she accidentally ticked ye "first in family" [to go to university] box, because it was fraud.

But those questions are really ambiguous, poorly documented with few, if any, explanatory notes, and fail completely for a number of very common edge cases. Few people piling on understood that.

Someone ticking the wrong box by accident is very much a feature not a bug of means testing.

@souvlaki @androcat Sounds similar to "voter fraud". The actual number of cases is very low, and a very large number of them are just honest and reasonable mistakes.

But the stress about them is high, and usually directed in entirely the wrong place - i.e. we should focus on systemic things like gerrymandering, not individual people casing an extra vote here and there (which are an entirely trivial threat to electing the wrong person).

@souvlaki @androcat

THIS 👆

This is basically just Type I vs Type II errors/specificity vs sensitivity/false positives vs negatives/etc. In the real world, you can’t eliminate all errors, so you have to decide which is worse.

That was the realization I had after a few years in the US: the voters for one political party can’t stomach the idea of someone “undeserving” getting “their” money. So much so that they’d happily accept a whole pile of people getting screwed (as long as those people are someone else, of course).

@souvlaki @androcat

You also have to consider what welfare benefits recipients spend the money on. It's likely a large proportion will be spent locally, on fairly simple things like housing, utilities, food, etc. If so it will be spent on taxable goods with local businesses that pay tax on profits, employ staff that pay tax, who in turn spend that money again on taxable goods, etc, etc. In other words, that money circulates in the economy, benefiting everybody, until it returns to the government (and is destroyed - it does not, in fact, pay for any government expenditure in most economies).

Tax fraud is much more damaging, because it is likely to be on excess income, which is much more likely to be saved, maybe in off-shore tax havens, or spent abroad, benefiting mainly foreign 'investors'.

So why focus on the relatively minor issues of 'generous' welfare or welfare benefits fraud?
Because the real point is that any safety net wage labourers can fall back on strengthens their hand in pay and conditions negotiations, or their individual ability to walk away from exploitative employment.

That's what the fear that generous benefit systems will lead to indolence really amounts to: that people won't be forced to work really hard for somebody else.

@souvlaki @androcat

Allow me to say, with "a certain degree of knowledge" constantly backed up by facts .. There's a point in this sentence .. "Norway", which like Finland/Sweden are "countries well known where certain things work ( well ) in a certain way". Now if you'd even just THINK to replace that with "Italy" I can tell you "you are barking MAD" and it's not about "welfare fraud" is about "<ANYTHING> fraud". So you have to analyse the context , not all works everywhere the same way.

@souvlaki @androcat so that's very nice, but there's a twist.

Ask someone in Norway, if you can find such a person, what it's like immigrating there, what it's like being a brown person there, first generation or otherwise, what it's like being Muslim, etc., etc.